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“The Only Battle in the Nation's History in Which the Black Community Has “The Only Battle in the Nation’s History in which the Black Community has not been Enlisted”: Black Agency, Resistance, and Alternatives to Incarceration Vesla M. Weaver, Yale University [email protected] Charles Decker, Yale University [email protected] March 26, 2014 Paper for presentation at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Seattle, WA, April 17-19, 2014. This draft is for presentation purposes; please do not cite or circulate without the author’s explicit permission. We thank the staff at the Library of Congress as well as Stephen Wulff for vital research assistance. “The war on crime has been one of the few battles in our history in which the black community has not been enlisted,” the young man thundered. The day was February 19, 1976, soon after the nation began its decades-long investment in punishment, ultimately swelling incarceration rates for the next thirty-five consecutive years. The normally soft-spoken man continued: “then and now, on urban fronts throughout the country thousands of poor and black people continue to be disproportionately victimized by crime…. The lack of black participation in the crime fight has created the false impression that the black community condones crime and protects criminals. Crime prevention, however, is a very high priority in the black community, as those of us who are of and in it know.”1 The young man was Ron Brown, the director of the National Urban League’s Washington Bureau, delivering the words of his junior colleague, Robert Woodson, and testifying before a congressional subcommittee that handled the main agency that would come to vastly bolster the nation’s prisons, police forces, and technologies of surveillance over the ensuing decades. That day in 1976 when he spoke, he offered a vision for crime control and a course of action that broke from prevailing practices as well as the framings of the left and right, arguing that the community was the first line of defense against crime. His message would not be heard. Black Americans are now much more likely than the day Brown spoke - or any other group today – to experience punishment and many have their earliest and most memorable interaction with the state in an encounter with police. The growth in policing and incarceration (and their racial inflection) are by now a well-known story of the post- 1 Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Part I, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime, Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., March 11, 1976, p. 423 (Statement of Ronald Brown, Director, National Urban League). 2 WWII American state. W.E.B. Du Bois’ observation that “police are our government”2 is even more true today: by the first decade of the millennium, a third of black men carry the label felon or ex-felon and 17 percent have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.3 Punitive interventions are now a central way, perhaps the most frequent way, that the state interacts with black citizens. Yet, what scholars have not investigated, and our aim in this paper, is why this state of affairs faced so little opposition as it unfolded over several decades, especially by the main group affected by this intervention and the victimization that was its supposed justification – blacks themselves. Why, on the heels of one of the most transformative revolutions to secure citizenship, in the heat of black activism and recently achieved black political empowerment, and with the pulse of civil rights groups still at full beat, did the black counterpublic not challenge the tremendous expansion in punishment and the practices that led to it? We explore a brief but insistent movement for community crime control that not only mounted a terrific counterpoint to the nation’s war on crime – proposing to substitute informal control for formal control and emphasizing protection from predatory violence rather than punishment for it—but also pressed the boundaries of the black political agenda beyond merely rights and representation (a seat at the table) and towards self-determination (control of the table). Below we bring scholars to the scene of a crucial campaign that could have, but did not, chart a different course as a way of understanding black ideational development and agency in one of the policy arenas which 2 Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro. 3 Christopher Uggen, Jeff Manza, and Melissa Thompson, "Citizenship, democracy, and the civic reintegration of criminal offenders," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605, no. 1 (2006): 281-310. 3 arguably has been the largest intervention into black life and communities since the civil rights movement. Before we journey back to that critical moment, however, we will locate our research within the recent and growing scholarly work on the politics of punishment. Recognizing that crime control has become a central aspect of state activity in the post- civil rights era, several scholars across disciplines have focused on analyzing the political forces, interests, and policies that led to the state investment in punishment. Others, recognizing these shifts in the face of the state in black citizens’ lives, have turned to exploring the consequences of the expansion in punitive interventions for democratic life, citizenship, and American democracy. Yet, while these accounts have flourished within our discipline and beyond, leading accounts of the carceral state mostly overlook the role of black politics and agency in defining, delimiting, and challenging the carceral state, seeing blacks as largely absent from crime politics, passive victims of an overreaching criminal justice system, as endorsers of punitive law and order politics, or as being failed by the acquiescence of white liberals and progressive groups.4 All, we will argue, are incomplete. We argue instead that not only was the war on crime launched over staunch black opposition but also that criminal justice practices and anti-crime programs evolved in such a way as to ultimately exclude the primary group being victimized and policed. Drawing on original archival material from the papers of the Urban League, interviews, historical accounts from the black press, congressional testimony, and data on anti-crime grant funding, we document that black grassroots groups and activists in concert with 4 Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 national leaders developed an alternative to the expansion of the carceral state that prioritized community control. Using an “actor-centered historical institutionalism,” in which we analyze how blacks mobilized around and framed the issue, their policy goals, as well as their local organizational behavior, we pay particular attention to how their response interacted with the institutional context created by the main crime bureaucracy, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. We first trace the emergence of this new ideology and approach to crime control at the national level, focusing on an alliance between John Conyers, a black member of Congress from Detroit, and representatives of the Urban League’s Administration of Justice Division, including Robert Woodson, Ron Brown, and Vernon Jordan. We then trace the development of community crime control at the local level, focusing on the Community Assistance Project in Chester, Pennsylvania, a free bail and conflict resolution program. Together, these campaigns reveal that blacks were neither silent nor unqualified supporters of the war on crime. During moments of high crime (and high attention to crime), disadvantaged communities confront new opportunities to redefine the issue and get attention to their needs.5 Black leaders during this moment, rather than exhibiting what Michelle Alexander calls an “awkward silence,” instead attempted to shift the problem definition, arguing that “the victims are us.” Their framings and policy goals stood apart from the approach and rhetoric of other liberal groups: they did not argue the traditional liberal mantra that crime was not about race – as their white counterparts had; instead, they embraced that crime was “essentially a minority condition” and should be confronted by blacks themselves. Led by the Urban League and their alliance with black 5 Lisa Miller, "Power to the people: Violent victimization, inequality and democratic politics," Theoretical Criminology 17, no. 3 (2013): 283-313. 5 members of Congress, but supported by groups as broad as the California Black Correctional Association, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement, and Harlem’s Congress of Racial Equality, they developed a black strategy for confronting crime that not only challenged the model of top-down infusion into the criminal justice system (expanding the capacity to arrest and confine), but also went beyond traditional liberal approaches to ameliorate crime by targeting its root causes of poverty, blight, and joblessness. Their approach was to empower community members to confront crime by strengthening and creating indigenous institutions and they sought to redirect the overwhelming focus on enlarging criminal justice agencies to supporting community- based, grassroots anti-crime initiatives. But their approach did not take hold. Instead, the story that emerges from their correspondence and testimony is that rather than making their communities safer, the national crime war (and LEAA) had targeted funds away from
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